Archive for the 'Google' Category

Oh (edit): Most of these suggestions are implemented as of February 7 2018. The only significant change that still does not seem to be implemented is the Oleh character. Thank you, Google, for your continued improvements of Gboard.

I mostly use the Gboard app for writing on my phone. The Samsung keyboard is generally not bad, but it doesn’t include Hebrew vowels, and I need them.

There are, however, several characters that are needed for Hebrew, and that aren’t included in Gboard, and some unnecessary characters could be removed.

These can be removed:

Long-pressing the minus (-) in the punctuation keyboard shows interpunct (·) and the em dash (—). They are unnecessary for Hebrew. The en dash (–), must not be removed, but see below.

The low line (_) appears twice in the punctuation keyboard: as its own key to the left of &, and as an option when long-pressing the minus (-). One of them can be removed. I’ll further argue that the en dash (–) is more useful for Hebrew than the low line (_), and the standalone low line can be replaced with the en dash. The low line is not used much anywhere except programming, while the en dash is useful for typing ranges correctly in Hebrew. I’ll readily admit that not a lot of Hebrew speakers know about the en dash’s correct semantics, but not many more people use the low line anyway.

And these should be added:

Maqaf (־, U+05be): It’s the Hebrew hyphen. It has different appearance and different direction semantics. It should be available when you long-press the minus in the main keyboard, and can also appear when you long-press the minus in the punctuation keyboard (for example, instead of the unnecessary em dash).

Geresh (׳, U+05f3) and Gershayim (״, U+05f4): These punctuation marks are similar in appearance to quotation marks, but they have different semantics. Apple went as far as replacing quotation marks on Hebrew keyboards on its devices with Geresh and Gershayim, which is an exaggeration. The usual quotation marks (‘, “) are used by most people, even though they are not perfect, and they must stay on Gboard where they are. The elegant Hebrew quotation marks (‚’„”) also appear on Gboard and must not be removed. Geresh and Gershayim can be added on the additional punctuation

Rafe (U+05bf): It’s a diacritic that looks like a line above a letter, and the opposite of dagesh, which is already available. It can appear when you long-press the letter resh (ר).

Oleh (U+05ab): It’s a diacritic that looks like a left-pointing arrow above a letter, and in modern Hebrew it signifies stress. It can appear when you long-press the letter ayin (ע).

The five character that I suggest to add are already part of the standard Hebrew keyboard (SII 1452), which is implemented in Windows 8. They must also be available in Android.

I hope that Google developers see this and make the necessary changes.

GMail has a weirdish feature that probably very few people except me know about. When using it with a Hebrew user interface, invisible control characters—LRM, RLM, RLE, LRE and the like—are added to some strings to make them appear correctly in a mixed-direction interface.

Most notably, they are added to email addresses. I sometimes want to copy these email addresses as text, and my mouse pointer picks the control characters as well. Of course, these control characters are by themselves invisible to humans, but very much visible to computers, and an email address with these characters is not correct, even if it appears to be the same to human eyes.

It already became a habit for me to carefully delete and manually restore the first and the last characters of an email address to make sure that the control characters are removed.

It would be better if GMail just used the <bdi> element or CSS bidi isolation. They are fairly well supported in modern browsers and provide better experience.

I always celebrate when I receive spam in a language in which I haven’t yet received spam. I just received spam in Serbian for the first time. It was in the Cyrillic alphabet; Serbian can also be written in Latin, and it is frequently done in Serbia, possibly even more frequently than in Cyrillic, even though the government prefers Cyrillic.

This makes me wonder: Is Serbian in Cyrillic popular and important enough for spamming in it, or did the silly spammer just use Google Translate to translate to Serbian and got the result in Cyrillic, because that’s what Google Translate does?

If you know Serbian, can you please tell me whether it looks real or machine-translated? Words like “5иеарс” and the spaces before the punctuation marks give me a strong suspicion that it’s machine translation, but I might be wrong.

It seems that the new GMail compose interface overrides Firefox’s Ctrl-Shift-X shortcut, which switches the writing direction. It also overrides the right-click->Switch writing direction function; it simply doesn’t do anything.

I can probably switch the direction by using rich text, but using rich text has its own issues, and I usually want to send my email in plain text.

Dear Google, please fix this. I tried the new compose interface several times and I complained about this problem in emails to my googler friends. Unfortunately this is still not fixed, and starting from today I can’t go back to the old compose interface.

I understand, of course, that GMail is a free service that doesn’t come with a warranty. Dear Google, I am asking you a favor. You did, in fact, contribute quite a lot to the development of support for right-to-left languages on the Web. I am only asking you to keep this support good.

Thank you.

P.S. Dear Google, please ask Google employees who speak right-to-left languages to use Google products in these languages, and to write email in these languages. Dog-fooding is the best testing. Thank you, again.

For the last couple of years I’ve been helping my parents to learn to use computers. Mostly very common and well-known things: GMail, Picasa, seraching Google, reading news websites, talking on Skype, the Russian social network Odnoklassniki, and not much more than that.

One of the most curious things that I found in my experiences with them is that emails and popups about new features are completely unhelpful to them. They always call me when they get them and ask me what to do now. It is awkward, because basically the emails tell them what to do, but instead of reading them and learning, they are reading them aloud to me:

— “It says: ‘Now you can find your friends more easily by typing their names in the search box’—so what do I do now?”

— “I don’t know… When you want to find somebody, type their names in the search box maybe?”

I am not saying that my parents are stupid; they aren’t. I am saying that these emails are not helpful. They appear to arrive from the helpful people in Google or Odnoklassniki, but the fact is that every time it happens, my parents are confused.

This makes me wonder: Is the effectiveness of these emails and popups and callouts researched? What are they good for? I don’t find them useful, because I actually like to find out things by myself; that’s my idea of user-friendliness: if it’s not self-explanatory, it is not user-friendly. My parents don’t find them useful, because they ask me what do the have to do. So is it useful for anybody?

PS 1: I know that Odnoklassniki is awful. They insisted.

PS 2: I know that Skype is not Free Software and that it doesn’t respect people’s privacy. Give me something properly Free that actually works. For what it’s worth, I did teach both of my parents to use Firefox and they hate other browsers, and on my mother’s laptop I installed Fedora, so except Skype, her online experience is almost completely Free.

In this post I shall use the Tower of Babel in a somewhat more relevant and specific way: It will speak about multilingualism and about Babel itself.

This is how most people saw the Wikipedia article about the Tower of Babel until today:

The tower of Babel. Notice the pointless squares in the Akkadian name. They are called “tofu” in the jargon on internationalization programmers.

And this is how most people will see it from today:

And we have the name written in real Akkadian cuneiform!

Notice how the Akkadian name now appears as actual Akkadian cuneiform, and not as meaningless squares. Even if you, like most people, cannot actually read cuneiform, you probably understand that showing it this way is more correct, useful and educational.

This is possible thanks to the webfonts technology, which was enabled on the English Wikipedia today. It was already enabled in Wikipedias in some languages for many months, mostly in languages of India, which have severe problems with font support in the common operating systems, but now it’s available in the English Wikipedia, where it mostly serves to show parts of text that are written in exotic fonts.

The current iteration of the webfonts support in Wikipedia is part of a larger project: the Universal Language Selector (ULS). I am very proud to be one of its developers. My team in Wikimedia developed it over the last year or so, during which it underwent a rigorous process of design, testing with dozens of users from different countries, development, bug fixing and deployment. In addition to webfonts it provides an easy way to pick the user interface language, and to type in non-English languages (the latter feature is disabled by default in the English Wikipedia; to enable it, click the cog icon near “Languages” in the sidebar, then click “Input” and “Enable input tools”). In the future it will provide even more abilities, so stay tuned.

If you edit Wikipedia, or want to try editing it, one way in which you could help with the deployment of webfonts would be to make sure that all foreign strings in Wikipedia are marked with the appropriate HTML lang attribute; for example, that every Vietnamese string is marked as <span lang=”vi” dir=”ltr”>. This will help the software apply the webfonts correctly, and in the future it will also help spelling and hyphenation software, etc.

This wouldn’t be possible without the help of many, many people. The developers of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera, who developed the support for webfonts in these browsers; The people in Wikimedia who designed and developed the ULS: Alolita Sharma, Arun Ganesh, Brandon Harris, Niklas Laxström, Pau Giner, Santhosh Thottingal and Siebrand Mazeland; The many volunteers who tested ULS and reported useful bugs; The people in Unicode, such as Michael Everson, who work hard to give a number to every letter in every imaginable alphabet and make massive online multilingualism possible; And last but not least, the talented and generous people who developed all those fonts for the different scripts and released them under Free licenses. I send you all my deep appreciation, as a developer and as a reader of Wikipedia.

I often help my friends and family members open email accounts. Sometimes they are starting to use the Internet and sometimes they move from old email services (Yahoo, Walla!, ISP) to something modern (like it or not, Gmail).

At some point they have to fill their name, which will appear in the “from” field. And then I have to suggest them to write it in Latin characters, even though most of them speak languages that aren’t written in Latin characters – mostly Hebrew and Russian. Chances are that some day they will send an email to somebody who cannot read Russian or Hebrew, and Latin is relatively better known.

Only relatively, though. It may seem obvious to you that everybody knows the Latin script, but in fact, a lot of people are not comfortable with it at all. There are also other complications: lossy and inconsistent transliteration rules (is Amir אמיר or עמיר?), potential right-to-left rendering problems, and more. And of course, all people are happy to see their name in their language.

And people are also happy to see their friends’ names in their own language and not in a foreign or a neutral language. I have, for example, a lot of friends in India. Most of them write their names in English, but some write it in Marathi or in Malayalam. It’s certainly good for them, but in practice it’s much harder for me to find them this way, so English would be better – but Hebrew or Russian would be better yet.

Finally, there are a lot of people in the world who have more than one linguistic background. Mine are Russian, Hebrew and English, and I am really not such a special case. There are many millions of immigrants who have mixed backgrounds: Punjabi-Hindi-Urdu-English, Kurdish-Turkish-German, Kazakh-Russian-Norwegian, and others, and others and others. From each of these backgrounds they have friends, co-workers and family members, with whom they would love to communicate in the respective language. In each of these backgrounds they have friends who would want to find them using the name under which they know them there and using the appropriate language and writing system.

And sometimes people change their names, too. I did it (twice!), and so have many other people.

All this means that people’s names should be translatable, just like books, articles and software interfaces. Facebook and Google+ allow me to add a very limited number of names in foreign languages. Why wouldn’t they let me write my name in four, five, ten languages? This would make it easier for people who speak these languages to find me and to communicate with me. I would go even further and allow people who speak languages that I don’t know well to write my name as their hear it in their language and to add it to my details. Yet again, this would make me easier to find to even more people.

Some degree of automation can be possible. A lot of names are, after all, repetitive, so social networks would be able to suggest people with common names how their name would be written in other languages.

Wikipedia is actually quite good in this regard: Usually people have the same username across projects, and this username is not necessarily written in Latin letters, but people can customize the appearance of their signature in each project. I did it in a few languages, and people who speak those languages appreciate it.

I can only hope that social networks and email systems will allow as much flexibility as possible with this.